Upstairs: Cameo by Bruno Pacheco

Working across wide-ranging motifs, Bruno Pacheco’s work is rooted in a language of painting. Here, a selection of works on paper are painted in tones that vary from pink and purple to a dirty yellow and green. With no one style, but a multiple and ever-changing approach to painting, Pacheco employs a circulating set of ideas and conditions that become reaffirmed and deconstructed through repetition.

This selection is based on the idea of a cameo – a small part of a whole of something standing in for something else. Here we have mutilated ancient Greek sculptures, neoprene wetsuits, red hats, tapestries and carpets being rolled and pulled up, as well as flora and fauna such as birds and mushrooms. In Pacheco’s practice, leitmotifs are composed through juxtaposition and association. The papers are meant to be legible, but sometimes only just, depending on your point of view, viewing conditions and relationship to the object. There is a tension between an irresolute representation and the information the eye adds. Pacheco is attempting to render but not describe, to inform us of the quality of a thing without describing it in its totality. There is an active brush and sometimes the image hangs on the edge of an abstraction rendering the surface open and in dialogue with the ephemeral conditions of looking. Cameo is a proposition, only one of any number of displays that could be formed from Pacheco’s oeuvre. In that sense then, there is a linguistic quality to the work that is attempting to capture the multitudinous aspects of subjectivity where one thing could stand in for another.